'Woe unto the land whose king is a child'; but despite a foreign claimant and rebellious barons, a nine-year-old monarch was steered successfully to adulthood in twelfth-century England by loyal guardians. David Carpenter tells how it was done and its impact on future constitutional developments in the Middle Ages.
In the light of the revised interest in the Soviet cinema Richard Taylor questions whether our traditional view of its output after 1917 as mere uplift (dreary or otherwise) is justified.
Ann Hills explores heritage Down Under.
Lesser breeds without the law? In a revealing new study of the Hellenistic world in the three centuries after Alexander carved out an empire in the East, Peter Green argues that condescension and cultural arrogance rather than a mission to civilise marked Greek reaction to the population they ruled over.
Scott Goodfellow on the row over archaeology by tender.
'After the love of God, I am intoxicated with the love of Prophet Mohammad. If you call it infidelity, by God I am the greatest Infidel'. Francis Robinson looks at the nineteenth-century Punjabi whose proclamation of a role as 'promised Messiah' still brings hostility from orthodox Muslims to the movement he spawned.
Sarah Jane Evans visits the National Railway Museum, York, with its emphasis on social history, science and technology and interactive exhibition.
A failure of national will in a decadent country, outgunned, outmanned and divided by class conflict? Douglas Johnson opens our summer series of Second World War reappraisals by looking at the myths and legacies of the fall of France to Hitler's blitzkrieg fifty years ago this month.
Evan Mawdsley discusses how scholarship both inside and outside the Soviet Union, spurred on by the political somersaults in the East, is revising our view of Lenin, the events of 1917 and after.
'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.
